A grant was recently awarded by NIH for the project Decision Aid to Technologically Enhance Shared Decision Making, led by Karen Kelly-Blake, PhD, Research Associate in the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences.
The goals of the study are to describe physician communication about colorectal cancer screening options and assess the impact of shared decision making on patient screening decisions, and to perform an exploratory interview analysis to describe how African American patients perceive the use and acceptability of information technology to improve clinical care, such as decision aids, within and outside the clinical encounter.
This investigation will identify what information the physicians delivered, how that information compares with the information provided in Colorectal Web (a decision aid which incorporates interactive patient preference clarification and risk assessment that help patients determine the colorectal cancer screening option which best matches their preferences), and what the patients ultimately preferred and decided during the clinical encounter.
Analysis of transcribed encounters and follow-up interviews with patients will describe how physicians communicate screening options to patients and how they do (and do not) incorporate patient values and preferences when discussing colorectal cancer screening, and provide more information on what is needed for effective application of information technology to improve health in under-served populations.
This project is a sub-award in collaboration with Dr. Masahito Jimbo, Associate Professor in the Departments of Family Medicine and Urology at the University of Michigan.
MSU Bioethics 